Ryan Girdusky: British Conservatives Offer Republicans a Populist Recipe for Success

I agree with Ryan Girdusky.

In my view, the problem is not Republican voters who are more receptive than ever to our worldview across a whole range of issues. Republican voters now largely agree with us on immigration, trade and foreign policy. They are even moving in our direction on core issues like White identity. In fact, our views on economics are swiftly catching on among Republican voters under the age of 45 and should triumph in another election cycle or two. Meanwhile, the Republican establishment is on the way out.

Why is this happening? No one really knows how many White Nationalists or people who are at the very least pro-White there are in America or how many of them voted for Donald Trump. It is definitely not an insignificant number of people though. The primary reason that there has been such a remarkable shift in the polls on these issues is because the composition of the Republican base has dramatically changed since 2012. We know for a fact from multiple surveys that the biggest swath of Donald Trump’s populist and nationalist base which he brought into the Republican Party in 2016 are White working class voters whose views on culture and economics are almost indistinguishable from the “far right.”

Half of the Republican Party is now composed of Trumpists.

We know them as a cluster of voters who show up in surveys who have been labeled the “Hard-Pressed Skeptics” or the “Market Skeptic Republicans” or the “American Preservationists.” These are all euphemisms for the White Nationalists or the “far right.” The number of people who hold these values and attitudes in the Republican Party now dwarfs the wealthy suburban True Cons voters.

This has led to a funny situation where some edgelords on the “far right” are essentially looking in the mirror and condemning their own reflection for being Republican voters. This big bloc of voters who basically share all our beliefs in surveys and who voted for Trump twice look exactly like us and have our exact views on our key issues because they are us. At least those us who bothered to vote in 2016 and 2020 which wasn’t everyone. It was mostly the people who aren’t as dialed in into politics.

In the UK, an identical situation has played out over the last 50 years: White working class voters who are social conservatives and who have traditionalist values, but who are moderates on economics, have been steadily alienated from the Labour Party which has been invaded and hijacked by affluent, college-educated PMCs who have antiracist, cosmopolitan and modernist values that come out of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. It is the same set of highly toxic cultural issues – mass immigration and political correctness – which dealigned these voters from the Labour Party where they either 1.) became disillusioned and dropped out of politics altogether or 2.) drifted and supported the BNP and UKIP before voting for BREXIT and reluctantly backing Boris Johnson and the Conservatives.

In the United States, this phenomenon played out as the collapse of the New Deal coalition, the steady alienation of populists from progressives in the 1960s and 1970s over racial and cultural issues, the realignment of conservatives to the GOP in the 1980s and the dealignment of populists, the migration of the Wallace Democrats or the Reagan Democrats to the GOP, which was followed by a long period in which these people were White Independent voters until they voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Boris Johnson and the Tories are ahead of the Republicans in adjusting to the realignment of the populists to the Right from where they had previously been dealigned in the Center:

Washington Examiner:

“Republicans must look to the British Conservative populism for future success.

Take what happened in last Thursday’s special election in Hartlepool, England. The Conservatives, or Tories, claimed a working-class district that had voted for the left-wing Labour Party for decades. But this was just the latest in a series of victories for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. Thanks to this success, what was once known as Labour’s “red wall” is now political rubble.

Working-class union voters have left liberals in Britain scratching their heads with the question, “What’s the matter with Hartlepool?”

The answer: It’s the culture wars, and it’s the latest sign that the populist realignment in the West is only just beginning. Political scientist Matthew Goodwin attributes this dynamic to the Conservatives’ success in taking economically left-wing and culturally right-wing positions. “Labour’s disconnection from the wider country is being amplified by a new fault line separating ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘traditionalists,’ which has little to do with class and much more to do with people’s age, level of education and also their geography: it is values that are now doing the heavy lifting,” wrote Goodwin in the Times. …

Trump owed his success in 2016 to the backs of the white working class and lost in 2020 because of his narrow loss with those voters. Despite seeing large gains among Latinos and a slight bump with black voters, his decline in support from white voters became his downfall.  …”

CNN:

“London (CNN) – Boris Johnson’s having a pretty great spring. The success of the UK Prime Minister’s coronavirus rollout coupled with the fast-approaching end of lockdown undoubtedly played a significant role in his Conservative party exceeding expectations at local elections last week.

However, the drift of voters in England to Johnson — including those from areas that had been held for decades by the center-left opposition Labour party — was also the result of a deliberate Conservative effort to become so dominant in England that his unpopularity in the UK’s smaller constituent nations like Scotland and Wales matters less.

After his undeniably impressive election win in 2019, a big question was how Johnson would spend the enormous political capital that he’d amassed. …”

If the GOP is just incapable of rethinking its messaging and policy agenda, it should emulate Boris Johnson and the Tories for now who for whatever reason have decided that winning by adopting populist and nationalist issues and causes like BREXIT makes more sense than fighting us.

The Republican base is now a populist-conservative coalition. It is united on social issues and divided on economics. Currently, the divide is about 85/15 (social conservative to social liberal) over social issues and 60/40 (economic conservative to economic populist) on economic issues. The old Republican establishment represented by the likes of Miles Taylor and Liz Cheney which is socially liberal and economically liberal and hawkish on foreign policy is the disaffected wing of the party.

The increasingly dominant populist wing of the Republican Party is socially conservative, moderate on economics and non-interventionist on foreign policy just as it used to be in the Democratic Party. It is the polar opposite of the cosmopolitan wealthy suburbanite establishment voters. Success for the post-Trump Republican Party lies in presenting itself as a nationalist and populist party of workers, rural voters and small businessmen which is socially conservative, moderate on economics and prudent in foreign policy while failure lies in clinging to Reaganism.